LAW HOMILY (Honoring Parents)

To confess our sin before you and be encouraged, strengthened, and rejoicing underneath the declaration, the assurance of pardon that you've granted to your people in our Lord Jesus Christ, in whose name we pray.

And amen. You may be seated.

The Fifth Commandment and the Call to Honor Parents

Every week, we go through the law of God because we wanna understand what God has to say to his people. And this week, we are in the fifth commandment. And this is how it reads. Honor your father and your mother that your days may be prolonged in the land which the Lord, your God, gives you.

There comes a moment in life where the phone grows quiet. The parents who once filled your days with noise and nurture begin to fade into the background and their advice maybe can feel a little outdated.

Their stories recycled. Their needs can be sort of inconvenient. And you tell yourself that that's just the way things go, you know, the circle of life or whatever they call it. But heaven calls it by another name, dishonor.

Think about it, the hands that once held you through the night sometimes tremble. The voices that once sang you to sleep now quiver when they speak. The parents who once bent over your crib are now bent beneath the weight of many years.

And while the God who gave them breath still calls them precious, sometimes their children grow so busy and so successful that they forget the fifth commandment. And they forget the fact that it has not expired when we move out of our home and into adulthood.

Honor your father and mother is not just a children's rule. It's a covenantal law for every generation. The Hebrew word for honor there is kaved, which means to make heavy. It means honoring something so much that you would give weight to it, that you would treat your parents as significant, not supplementary, central, not peripheral.

The honor is to carry the burden of gratitude that no age or achievement can cancel. And every time that we treat our parents lightly, we mock the God that gave them to us. The way that we handle authority often reveals how we truly relate to the authority giver.

We live in a world that worships youth and forgets wisdom. The gray head that scripture calls a crown of glory is sometimes a punchline in our society. We hide our elders behind sterile walls, we praise family values and yet we never pick up the phone.

I'm guilty of this as well. We build nursing homes for our parents and shrines for ourselves. We hire strangers to feed the hands that once fed us and we call it compassion. We confuse autonomy for maturity, independence for holiness, busyness for righteousness.

But perhaps the sin is quieter. Maybe you're not hostile towards your parents, maybe you're just simply absent from them. You're not their enemy, but you're also not their ally or friend either. A cold shoulder is rebellion with manners.

You don't have to curse your parents in order to disobey this commandment, you only have to forget about them. When you stop calling, when you start cooling, when you stop caring, the relationship starts dying.

Apathy towards your parents is apathy towards your God. And one of the things I'd like to encourage us with today, if you have living parents, reach out to them, care for them, love them, honor them. Look to the left or right and say you love them.

And the command doesn't give us an exception clause,.

Does it?

It doesn't say if you have parents that you feel are worthy of honor, then you can honor them. It says honor your father and your mother that your days may be long upon the earth. Many of us have been in a situation where we have had parents that are very challenging, parents that were sinful even to us.

And yet, when we look at the relationship between us and our father, he's the one who always forgives. He's the one who always loves us. He's the one who delights over us, sings over us, cares for us.

And how much more so for us as believers that we would have the same love of the father towards our fathers and towards our mothers that he has had for us in our sin and our failure and our rebellion.

So brothers and sisters, what kind of father or mother you have is less important than the kind of honor that you pour back to them. And you've seen it modeled in the face of Jesus Christ.

Amen?

Amen.

Let's pray. Lord, help us from the smallest child to the one now who doesn't have a father and mother, whose father and mother have already passed away and gone. Lord, help us to be an honoring people from the very top to the very bottom in every sphere.

Help us to be honoring. Lord, help our honor to be a ministry to our parents. Help our love and care for them to be a testimony to them of our gratitude for what they've done for us. And Lord, if there are areas of brokenness between parents and children, then Lord, I pray that you'd bring healing to it.

And I pray, Lord, that all of us would have that posture that we're going to love like Christ first loved us, even in hard situations and hard relationships. And it's in Jesus' name we pray.

Amen.

Amen.

Universal Sin, Covenant Breaking, and the Need for a Redeemer

All of us have broken commandment with God. All of us have done something in our life that has violated this commandment, the fourth, the third, the 10th, the 612th. There's 612 laws in the first five books of the Bible.

So you've broken them. All of us have. And all of us, by necessity, need a redeemer. All of us have this week have broken covenant with God. And here's the thing I don't want us to do. I don't want us to think that, well, Jesus has forgiven us of all of our sins, therefore we're good.

The only difference between us and the Old Testament saints who had to continually go to the altar with new animals is that the once for all sacrifice has been made.

Amen.

Confession, Forgiveness, and the Lamb of God

But John says that if we confess our sins, he's faithful and just to forgive us of our sins, which means that you can't just offer a blank check forgiveness prayer. Dear God, forgive me of all my sins, past, present, future.

This will be my last communication to you. Obviously you can't do that. Every week we repent of our sins. Every week we're reminded of the forgiveness. So let us be reminded today that the Lord God forgives his people when they sin.

John chapter one, verse 29 says, the next day he saw Jesus coming to him and said, behold, the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. That is who Jesus is. And if you know him, and if his blood's been painted on the doorpost of your heart, then you are forgiven of your sins, both today and yesterday and forevermore.

Amen.

Amen.

Confessing Faith in the Definition of Chalcedon

Let us stand together and confess our faith this morning in the definition of Chalcedon. Dear Christian, in light of Jesus's great forgiveness, what do you believe?

Therefore.